Blaire Toso: Hi. Thank you so much. Welcome, everyone. This is session two of "Creating Career Pathways and Using the Updated Adult Education to Workforce Dashboard Tool." We're delighted if you are rejoining us because we're going to be digging deeper into the work that we did on the 15th when session one ran. If not, and you're brand new, we will be doing a quick recap in the beginning and then diving right down into the work. So welcome, everyone. New or returning, we're delighted to have you. Next slide, please.

So a big thank you. Our program year is closing out today. This is our last webinar of the '21-'22 program year. And so we'll start planning and delivering more in the Fall, but we just wanted to say thank you from the full CAEP team, who is all here on the webinar with you.

And I'd like to give a particular shout out to Alexandria Wright, who will be doing the presentation today, and she'll introduce herself as she gets started. But a big thank you to all of you who have joined us prior to this or-- and supporting this year's professional development out of the WestEd AEP team. Next slide, please.

So, and I'd like to also turn it over to some of the people who we would take a special moment to thank in supporting this work because they have both informed, guided, participated, and really carried the load with us for this year. And that's Mayra Diaz and Lindsay Williams from the Chancellor's Office. Mayra.

Mayra Diaz: Thank you, Blaire. Good afternoon. I hope you're all enjoying the summer weather and gearing up for the holiday weekend. I would like to welcome and thank you for participating in today's webinar presentation. As Blaire mentioned, my name is Mayra Diaz, and I'm the CAEP Program Lead with the Chancellor's Office. And my colleague, Lindsay Williams, and I work collaboratively to support the statewide adult education program at the Chancellor's Office. So we are excited that you can join us this afternoon to learn from today's wonderful presenters, and I will turn it back over to them. Thank you.

Blaire Toso: So this is our agenda. And just because it's the last one, and just because it's summer and steamy outside, we are still going to dive in deep and give you lots of content and things to mull over over the next few weeks. So this is it. We're going to explore the steps to building the career pathways and career systems with equity and a review of the California Adult Education dashboard details. And so that will be that quick review.

And then Lexi's really going to apply that knowledge by walking us through three different case studies of how we might want to apply and think about us to think about building career pathways with an eye to equity. Next slide, please.

And really, our objectives are understanding and applying those different steps and the considerations for building career pathways and career systems with equity and really considering all the data that's available to you to build career pathways within your program or within your consortia that are built on data and really serve your students' needs. And then also, then understanding and applying that through these three different examples. Next slide.

All right, at this point, I'm going to hand it over to Lexi, and she's going to take you through the content of this. Lexi.

Alexandria Wright: Great. Thank you so much, Blaire. I appreciate everybody being here today. And as Blaire said, we do have a bunch of content. But don't let that scare you. This is really about interactive engagement in so far as how we're going to use this dashboard. Please feel free to unmute as we start moving through the exercises. You'll see I started with a pretty easy one like health care that we can all relate to and then move into the more complex ones. So with that, I'm going to share my deck with you. All right.

OK, So we'll start with a quick review of-- oops, my apologies. I'm going to stop sharing really fast. I had it on the wrong slide. Let's get that ready for you guys again. There we go. OK. My apologies. All right. Let's do this again.

All right, pathway planning. So again, a quick review of what we did last time with those of you who were here with us last time. We had a couple of steps and a couple of ideas to keep in mind when we talk about building or enhancing career pathways with equity. What kind of information do we need, as you've recognized by now WestEd and our little our little team here in post-secondary and workforce development, really focuses on the application of data and data-informed practice to address multiple issues and multiple objectives when it comes to adult education?

So what we're really trying to answer is, given your local context wherever you are, which career pathways and which enhancement strategies to accelerate movement along those career pathways offer the best opportunities to address the identified equity gaps for improved employment outcomes in your school? So we always want to look at local economic and labor-market information, right? That provides us information on high-demand jobs that lead to a living wage.

And notice, in a lot of what we do here in all of our dashboards, we're including your local living wage so that you can best understand what's going on. So it's not just those what's the largest quantity of jobs out there and available for those who don't have a bachelor's degree, but more so what are the specialized skills jobs that are paying the most for those without a bachelor's or associate degrees, meaning which one of those jobs pay livable wages, right?

Which industries are hiring? And what are those career paths that are going to result in economic mobility in their local economy? We know that really irrespective of somebody's degree or award or major, unless it's an industry credential or specialized skill, that they end up working any job in their local community. So we need to best understand what's going on in our local economy.

Then we always have our real-time labor-market information. That's our job-posting information that talks a lot about skills. And as we get into this dashboard, you'll hear why we're so concerned with skills. It is absolutely one of the categories that we classify adult education in in so far as those skills-builders courses. And it also tells us about the frequency of job postings per occupation. So it gives us a real nice feel about demand.

And then finally, we always want to be mindful of all of our credentials from adult education to community college and university-- those stackable lattice programs that need to be in short duration. They need to have labor market value within and of themselves. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this once we get into the dashboard.

And they should be part of a structured pathway that's non repetitive, meaning, if you're partnering with your local community college, if your adult school is hosted by your local community college, that students aren't repeating this class work and these competencies in, say, credit bearing when they've already taken it in non-credit. OK?

So we have some steps kind of laid out for steps to pathway planning. And you'll notice in your chat box, Ayana's going to be placing in there some of these links for you guys to peruse just as I'm moving through them. So our first three steps, really, when it comes to pathway planning-- number one is our CAEP fact sheet. You've seen other webinars about this CAEP fact sheet. It's got a variety of sociodemographic and socioeconomic as well as institutional transition data in there for you. You'll see a little picture there in the right-hand side of this slide.

So first of all, we want to identify our target populations. Then we want to identify our pathway program. And we start by understanding our target sectors. What's going on in our local economy, and what are those skills that are intertwined and high demand in that target sector? And then we can start to move to the actual job titles and better understand our occupational clusters and, furthermore, those valuable industry credentials that create greater earning potential in value for the student in the labor market.

So again, Ayana is probably placing both of those links in there, and we'll try to repeat those as we go through the lecture in case somebody missed them. So once we identify our target population, then we identify our pathway program. Then we need to start looking at strategies for accelerated learning. And a lot of these are going to sound familiar to you, especially IET, right?

So I already mentioned stacked and latticed credentials that lead to high-quality jobs and align with that movement up a pathway where people can actually move up and up and up the career ladder. Competency-based education, such as pre-apprenticeship courses. Some of you may already be running those or skills-builder courses, as I mentioned earlier. It's a particular classification of courses that we have. IET or IELCE program-- excellent, excellent model for accelerated learning.

And then we also have some things like improved and personalized student-support services. For example, if you're serving American-Indian communities, your family is very engaged in the entire educational process and the learning process. And it actually improves student outcomes when you engage that family in initial orientation and advising-- so stuff like that. And then another one I thought I'd throw it in there-- online and distance learning, of course, for that rapid kind of feedback.

After these first three steps, then we move on to the last two. Oh, and you know this. I'm sure everybody on this call knows your workforce system partners, but I thought I'd put in here a couple more that maybe are kind of beyond your scope right now or something that you might be interested in.

Not just your workforce development board, but make sure that we're partnering with that AJCC because that's the entity that's actually placing students-- labor unions, industry associations, and economic development collaboratives are an excellent way to kill multiple birds with the same stone. You get all your employers in the room. You can ask them the questions. You can validate those industry credentials that you're looking to incorporate or those skills that you're looking to incorporate into ABE programming.

Your community-based organizations can help you connect with your target populations. And then, of course, entrepreneurial assistance-- that's that complementary, supplementary skill set that most everybody in the United States needs in the modern era at some point or another. Probably at least 80% of your students are going to be somewhat in the gig economy.

And then finally, this one-- adult educators have always been aware of systems changes. But this is now finally at the forefront of all education and workforce development. And this is where we're talking about really tangible pathway-systems changes-- changes to program designs, like we talked about earlier-- those accelerated learning strategies. Policy changes, new workforce system and employer partnerships, new approaches to employer engagement.

We have a CTE fact sheet. I'm not sure if we were able to address that in any of our webinars, but I'm sure we'll be having another one coming up. Jessica Keach on this great adult ed team is the grounding for those awesome CTE fact sheets. And we're looking at developing one just for adult education. New ways of supporting students and new methods of instructional delivery.

All right, so let's get into this dashboard and get into some of the exercises here. So we wanted to provide-- oh, I'm going to pause really fast and just make sure I don't have any other questions. All right, good. Everybody's just introducing themselves. Excellent. So we want to remind everyone that this dashboard is built off of your information, OK? So the first time the dashboard was built was using secondary information.

So basically, we were scouring. We were conducting an environmental scan. You heard Ally Bollel at the last session talk about her methodology for that. So we were looking for any types of classes that were already listed online. Then, this last Spring, we actually conducted a primary data-gathering exercise where many of you-- we went through your consortium directors, and we asked for many of the adult schools-- most all of you guys-- to give us an update. What's going on in your programming? What do you have? Can you please help classify it for us?

So we classified all adult education programming into three different types. We have our workforce prep. So that's your generic work readiness, right? It crosses all industry sectors and all occupational clusters. So work readiness, digital literacy, OSHA-- stuff like that. Then we have our occupational skills-builder courses. These are ones that start to get the student more specialized, starts to increase their value in the labor market, and puts them on that career trajectory. But it's not so isolated. It's not super-duper highly specialized that the student has to stay in that their whole life. So I'm talking about things like SolidWorks and computer-aided drafting that can be used across manufacturing. It can be used in construction sites. So a specialized skill but not hyper-specialized industry sectors. Welding is another one of those, right? Welding can be used across multiple industry sectors.

And then finally, we have our very hyper-specialized occupational credential programming. These are your programs that are really closely correlated or directly correlated to occupational opportunities, such as medical assistants, CNA-- usually all those health care-- those health care credentials because those are immediately and directly tied to occupations. So keep that in mind. As you are building out your classwork, as you're thinking about entry-- maybe you need to update your programming in our dashboard-- keep in mind these three different categories.

So this is an example of the worksheet that you would have received. If you haven't received it, don't worry. I'm going to talk about that in the next slide, how you can get updated information in there. So you can see here some examples. Tier 3 is that super-specialized, hyper-specialized occupational training. You have your CNA, your med assistant, et cetera. Home health aide's another one-- caregiving and home health aide.

And then you see your tier 2, right, which are just the occupational skills builder, not that generic work readiness, that workforce prep, right? So these are three categories. This is something, again, that if you need to update your coursework in the dashboard-- so you have a nice comprehensive dashboard to do some analysis with-- you're going to be filling something like this out.

And then finally, again, as we get into the dashboard, and you start moving around in it and pressing all those buttons, you might notice that your programming is not up to date. While we were funded to update this during the CAEP project, we are going to do our best to maintain an updated dashboard. Please do email either Dr. Toso at btoso@wested.org or Ally over at abollel@wested.org.

And if you can, just let them know, hey, not all our program is in there. If you want to go ahead and list some stuff out, these are the elements that we're going to need. What's your school? What's the program title? Is there an affiliated industry credential? Is it an IET IEL/CE designation? Is it a pre-apprenticeship? And what's the SOC associated with that program or industry sector? Your standard occupational classification. And then which type of career program is it, of course, right? Is it that generic workforce prep? Is it an occupational skills builder? Or is it hyper-specialized occupational credential program? OK?

All right, and with that, let's get into one more thing. So we're going to use a couple of tools we're not just going to use the dashboard. We're actually going to use an open-source tool that we've created here at WestEd, again, our little post-secondary and workforce-development team. It's called Opportunity Maps. And I believe Ayana is going to stick a link right into the chat box where you can access this.

I'm going to go through it too. So if you click on the link and you're like, oh, my gosh, where do I go? Just hold on one second. I'm going to be there shortly. But essentially, these Opportunity Maps are a tool to help administrators and faculty better understand career trajectories and emerging occupations and skills demands, right? It's a really complex time that we're in right now. There's emerging occupations. There's emerging skills. There's the demand for interdisciplinary skills, even though there's also concurrently in demand for hyper specialization.

So it's really an interesting time in our economy that really isn't like any other decade we've experienced. Last century, we pretty much knew the jobs in construction and manufacturing and health care. Again, now things have started to emerge. Some of you may have heard about a new health care occupation.

One would think that health care is pretty static because it's so highly regulated, but the state of California has actually put out money-- and you guys may have participated in it, especially those of you who are hosted by community colleges-- called a navigator. It's kind of like a social systems navigator. So somebody who's specialty trained that can be trained in adult education to help patients navigate the health care system. So something like that.

So anyway, so these are a particular map. This is a cool little design, right? You're not going to see the same designs when we go to work on these in the rest of this webinar series because this is a brand new design that came out. We put together the original Opportunity Maps to include community colleges into university programming and jobs. As you can see here, it's very explicit. We're talking about skills on the left-- foundational skills and technical skills.

Then we're talking here about adult ed. Then we get into our community college certificates and associates, and then, finally, into the bachelor's programs. And you can see the correlating jobs as well as wages beneath, right? So these are the jobs that require a certain educational attainment with their correlating wages. The maps that we're going to be looking at today do not include adult education. Unfortunately, we were just not funded to do that.

However, if, by the end of this webinar, you go, oh, my gosh, we need these maps-- again, they're also helpful for students. They can help inform students about their pathways, but they can also help, again, internally with the development and inquisition into career pathways-- always reach out to us. We would be happy to produce these for you. And we can discuss more details later.

All right, so let's get into health care. OK, exercise 1. I chose health care because, again, it's the most common of all industry credentials that we see in adult education. We typically see something like a CNA or a home health aide or caregiver, if you're not in the state of California, right? So I put together-- again, here's the bit.ly link. If you scroll in your chat, you're probably going to see that again.

And I put together a few steps for us to follow. So I'm going to go through the steps, and then I'm going to switch screens. And we're going to go over to the dashboard, and we're going to follow the steps in the dashboard. And we're kind of going to go back and forth, right? And you can see here, right on the right-hand side, I put, hey, a big hint. If you take a look at your Opportunity Map first, it's easier for you to understand how to verify the occupations that you're going to be targeting.

So basically, your brain is going to see that Opportunity Map and some occupations-- per skill level, per award credential level. And then when you go into use the dashboard, you're going to register some familiarity. So you're going to become more and more familiar with what's going on in that sector.

So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to query by sector and regions, you're going to choose the industry, and then you're going to choose the region. And then you're going to query by entry level education. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to click on Post-Secondary Non-Degree Award, and we're going to click on High School Diploma because that's most reflective of the educational attainment that one's going to achieve at adult schools.

Another quick note-- if you begin with the two entry level education categories that align with the adult ed awards, but then you toggle to an associate degree or bachelor's, the dashboard will start to populate more jobs. And it will become clearer and clearer how to build out those pathways. OK?

And then steps 3 and 4-- we're going to go down to the bottom of the dashboard, and we're going to actually query by award type. Right so we're going to look at the adult ed educational offerings that come up once we query by sector and region and that third one of educational attainment level. So we, basically, have three things we're querying in the first two steps.

And now we're going to look at what the dashboard spit out in terms of local educational programming. We want to ensure that we're identifying opportunities to either build new pathways, leveraging existing pathways, and, certainly, to reduce duplication efforts if we see a lot of that similar programming going on in proximity to one's adult school.

And then finally, we're going to query by closest college and award type. You can choose your closest college if you feel like it, if that's super important to you, and you think that your students are definitely going to go to a certain college. That's great. If not, you can leave it open, and it'll keep all the colleges in your macro region listed on there.

But then you also want to choose award type. So you want to choose Certificate of Achievement, No Award, Noncredit Program, right? And again, that will help you to start understand what the available opportunities and options are to build out that latticed pathway program. And then finally, we want to look at the community college programs by occupational cluster because we can start to identify those stackable career pathways again.

And like here, Healthcare Practitioners and Technicians, Healthcare Support Occupations-- this will help students understand the actual job titles. And you'll see more differentiation when we get into the other exercises in the pathways. And then we have one final step here. And this is where we bring in the Opportunity Map, so this is what those Opportunity Maps will look like once we get into this tool.

But we want to make sure that we're sequencing the learning from ABE, HSE, GED into stackable career education courses that offer generalizable work readiness, occupational skills building, or industry credentials that pay livable wages-- so as long as there's an opportunity to move up that ladder, OK?

All right, I'm going to check the chat box. Please raise your hand if you have any questions right now. All right, cool. Thank you, Blaire, for putting in some complimentary notes there and supplementary information. And thank you, Ayana, for posting that again. I'm going to stop sharing, and we're going to get into the dashboard right now.

Oh, AEB stands for Adult Basic Education. So a lot of what we lecture on is once you understand your local economy, you can start to contextualize the reading, comprehension, the writing, and the mathematics that is included in adult basic education to your local economy. So for example-- and this is where the skills come in.

This is where all of the research on what are the high-demand skills in that industry sector or occupational cluster because we can start to better understand, hey, so if we have a ton of manufacturing around us, we could actually include an exercise in our activities for reading and writing that includes standard operating procedures that helps interpretation because that's one thing I know all employers are looking for-- can the person follow SOPs? So that's why we talk about understanding one's local economic context and being able to meld that into exercises in AEB. OK.

So with that, let me get into our dashboard now. And I was on the fact sheets. Give me one moment. There we go. OK. All right, so here we are in our dashboard. And this is how it's going to pop up for everyone. So again, this is open sourced. We're going to try to update this on an annual basis. If you notice stuff is missing, please, please do email us this summer. This is a great time for us to get that information in there.

So remember step 1 was the sector title, right? So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to choose our sector. So the way this works out-- if you only wanted to choose one sector, you just-- to every box is going to be checked, and you just want to check the Only. So let's come down here, and let's look for health care practitioners. So I'm going to check only there.

But I want more than just health care practitioners. Why? Because I know that, in the health care system that is constantly expanding in every single one of our counties, that there's actually more than just technology-based occupations. There's actually a lot of back office and administrative staff. So I'm going to want to check both health care practitioners and technologists, as well as health care support occupations. And I'm going to leave it at that

And then I'm going to practice this for the San Diego region. So I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to click only for San Diego, OK? So as we can see, this board is updating. And so it's giving us-- let's see here-- everything queried under the sector title and the region. But I have yet to choose my entry level education. So we can start to see what's going on here. So let me look over here. And I want to uncheck some of this stuff.

So I want to make sure that I'm unchecking graduate degrees. I want a post-secondary non-degree award. I want my high-school diploma or equivalent. I want to uncheck my doctoral box. I want to uncheck my bachelors. And I'm going to uncheck associate for now because I'm just interested in those occupations and the wages for programs that I know I can offer at my adult school.

So here we'll see, in the San Diego region, based off of the MIT living-wage calculator, we have $23 is our living wage for the macro region, which I believe it's San Diego and Imperial counties. Now, because San Diego includes Imperial County, I would strongly encourage those of you who are located, who, if you know-- and we also have a quick guide to-- by the way, we have a quick guide to understanding where your macro region is and where your school is located. I think maybe Ayana or Blaire can probably put that link in the chat box as we continue with this lecture.

So if you're confused-- you're like, what's a macro region? I don't know where my school is. We have a nice cross-reference sheet that you can identify where your macro region is. And again, for those of you who are located in a macro region in a specific area that's more rural than the larger regions-- for example, San Diego, Imperial Valley-- the cost of living is much higher in San Diego County than it is in imperial-- so you will, when we put a little link right here, go into the living wage calculator and look specifically at Imperial Valley because it's a little lower than 23 bucks.

So that might be something contextual that you want. We always put the higher wage in there in each macro region. We try to average it out. We don't really want to average it out. I take that back. But we wanted to take what would be the most common. So again, if you're in a rural area for that macro region, always go to the living wage calculator yourself.

OK, so I have my entry-level education. I have my sector, and I have my region. So now I can start looking down, and I can see, oh, look at all of these different occupations. And if I click this little arrow over, it's going to be giving me another page of occupations. And look at, we start to get into medical transcriptionist, right? Medical equipment preparers. And again, those are those cross-sectoral occupations that come out of the skills builder courses or even some of the less specialized occupational courses-- the occupational skills builder versus the occupational credential program.

So as we go through this, we can see all these skills. And again, active learning, decision making, coordination, critical thinking-- these are all those exercises that we can include in just our adult basic education activities and exercises. And we can certainly start to contextualize them in health care. Shoot, filling out a admittance form for a hospital is in and of itself a reading comprehension exercise, right?

So anything that you can get to contextualize that ABE program to start building it into one of those occupational skills builders is really interesting. And then we come down here. So let's go down, and let's remember our fourth and fifth-- third and fourth steps-- I'm sorry. So I already did our third step, which was the educational-- the entry-level education. But I want to come down here, and I start to see, OK, these are the health care support occupation trainings and the health care practitioner and technologist trainings.

And I start to see them all listed by the school name. Sometimes, the hours of instruction wasn't available. Sometimes, it was. And you can see here we have 75 different entries. So you can kind of scroll through all of these entries to see what's going on. We have a variety of different programs that are popping up here that all deal with this sector.

Now let's come over here to our community college awards. So the last thing that we can do is we can query by college and award type. So I'm in San Diego. These are all the community colleges that are serving the San Diego-Imperial Valley macro region. I'm just going to leave it at that for right now. But I'm going to come over here to award type, and I'm going to unclick some stuff. I'm going to unclick Transfer Degree.

I'm going to unclick-- I'm going to unclick all of these, except for certificate of achievement and no award or non-credit program because I'm curious to see what's going on with just these kind of short-term industry credential programs that are, hopefully-- well, short-term programs, non-credit programs, that are, hopefully, tied to an industry credential so they retain value in and of themselves and, again, add value for the student in the labor market.

And so I can start to see here, there's a lot of certificates of achievement. There's 79 different entries here. And if I keep going down the list, I'll probably keep popping up more and more sorts of achievement. We start to get into other colleges. So we start to see what all the offerings are. So I'm going to come back up here just to show us. I'm going to click a couple of other things. Say that I said, OK, now that I understand what the immediate and direct opportunities are for transitioning from adult school into a non-degree award that has value, I want to know what the next step in that career pathway will be.

So I'm going to go ahead and check here AA degree or AS degree-- or AS for transfer. I do believe nursing science and health science is usually under AS, OK? And I'm just curious about that. You can always-- let's go ahead and separate them. Let's just do associates of science right now and see what pops up. Go ahead, Blaire.

Blaire Toso: Quickly, there's just a question from Janae. I think she was asking about how, with the work experience and checking them. And she wanted to know, should she leave the work experience search as both none and less than five years?

Alexandria Wright: That's a great question. And let's go back up and talk about that. So here, you can see a couple of different things now started popping up the associates. But let's go back up to that work experience. There's a reason why I left it blank. And that's because it's really based on your school. So we all know that work-based learning is the hot, hot, hot topic, right? So many of your programs, particularly if it's an IET program, you're going to want that work-based learning in there.

So work-based learning can include anything from a paid internship to job shadowing to a plant tour, right? Just exposure. When we talk about building career pathways with equity, those are some of the things to keep in mind-- that students being able to articulate their actual skills, students being exposed to new careers and opportunities, those start to fill the gaps that are left by inadequate social capital when it comes to equity-- those equity conversations, right?

So if you know that you are dedicated to work-based learning, and you have the capacity in your adult school, let's go ahead and uncheck the none, and let's just check less than five years. All right, so there we go. There's no jobs that require work experience. So if you're curious-- you're going, oh, well should I apply for more WIOA funds? Do we need more capacity? Do I need to get monies from elsewhere because I'm going to have to include some internships or job shadowing or plant tours or whatever it is? This is a great way to best understand that.

Now, when we lift this up, let's see to associate degrees. Let's see if anything pops up. So nothing really changed here. So most everything is built in at this point. So if we change this, and we go only no work experience, that's when everything comes back up. So I hope that answered your question in a roundabout way. It's, basically, a way for you to explore what capacity is going to be needed for the career pathways that you want to focus on-- so to tell you whether or not that work experience is required. OK, excellent.

OK, so with that, we kind of queried through everything. So I'm going to go back over to my Opportunity Map. So I'm going to-- actually, I take that back. Let's go over to our Opportunity Map. So right here, Ayana going to put into our chat box the link to our little team site here at WestEd. And it should take you directly to this page, Designing Metamajors to Reduce Equity Gaps. You're going to scroll down here. It gives you a lot of information on how to use these things. But we'll just start using them.

And you're going to go all the way down to Explain the Relationship Between Education and Jobs. This, again, is the tool here. Because we're focusing on San Diego Imperial, I'm going to click on that. And again, this is open source. And I'm going to see all of the meta majors for San Diego Imperial macro region. We have a lot of metas and macros now in our vernacular, don't we?

And I'm going to come down over here to Help. And if you click on that, it's going to pull this up for you. Now, remember, it doesn't have adult educators in there. However, if you would like these maps contextualized to your school, just contact us. Please contact Dr. Toso. You can probably do it for a small amount of funding. This happened to come from another project, so we thought this would be a helpful supplementary tool for you guys.

So, again, here, we can see all the high-impact skills. We can see the technical skills. We can see exactly what's going to happen once that student gets that certificate and which jobs they'll be headed to. We know darn well that in adult school, you can train for CNAs and home health aides slash caregivers. And those will lead to occupations. They're not quite living-wage occupations, but they do start students on the pathway, right?

So I want to give us something a little more detail because we kind of know health care. Health care is highly regulated. Industry credentials-- there's really no such thing because any program you implement in health care has got to have those regulatory requirements. What I really wanted to make sure that we learned from this, though, is that remember, you can have a health care pathway that doesn't end up as a CNA and a nurse.

You can have a health care pathway that shoots a student through into medical assisting and then further into administrative and back office stacks-- medical recordkeeping, right? You can offer that at adult schools. You can offer transcription at adult schools. And then that can move them on into a pathway into a bachelor's for health care administration, then, ultimately, if they wanted, into that master's in public health. So just want to make sure that we do have-- keep that in mind that we have multiple.

It's technicians, but it's also that administrative kind of understanding and critical thought and knowledge-- knowledge of your Microsoft Office Specialist. So that's Microsoft Office Specialist industry credential is something that you could offer through an IET program that would be an occupational skills builder course that can cross over several sectors, including health care.

So I'm going to stop for just a moment. I'm going to read-- Nancy had a good chat in here. What are the barriers to inclusion that the SOCRC has been experienced, particularly in health care, is the cost of participation. Absolutely. For example, vaccination. Absolutely. Any suggestions? Yes. Let's see. Health is not-- oh, the LA Health one. We'll have to look into that, Mr Bishop. Sorry about that-- or Ms. Bishop. I'm sorry. CJ-- whichever one you are, we'll have to look into the health care one for Los Angeles territory.

Insofar as helping, I've actually, myself-- so I didn't give quite a full background of myself. I've run adult education programs and developed IT programs for community college hostings adult schools. And what we've done for the health care stuff is we actually were able to buddy up with Contract Ed because we were always conglomerated into same thing. So economic and workforce development divisions typically do host adult schools and buddy up to them.

They were able to give us a little funding for the uniforms and the vaccinations, and then, I will also mention, through your consortium. This is something that you can posit for your consortium. All of the funding that comes out-- you know how we get a little extra every year, right? And everybody, depending on what your process is at your consortium level, perhaps you can put in for a little extra funding to subsidize the cost of that. To your point, students absolutely shouldn't be paying for this, right? That's part of filling that equity gap, right, Nancy?

So finding the money to subsidize the cost of the uniforms and the vaccinations is absolutely critical. The California Community College Chancellor's Office also offers grants that can be used in coordination with pre-apprenticeships going down into adult schools. So don't forget, you guys all have a community college sitting on your consortium that could also potentially help subsidize these costs. I'm going to hand it over to Blaire for another comment here.

Blaire Toso: Yeah, thanks. It's a great question, and we're always sort of plugging away at finding places to actually support some of those costs that aren't necessarily considered when we talk about education-- all of those surrounding costs. But we have found that programs partner with employers even if they aren't necessarily guaranteeing a job, but they know that there are openings, and they are willing to invest in educational programs-- that they have been very helpful. Also, finding community partners that have an eye to the particular industry that you're looking at.

So for example, manufacturing-- some of the associations will help out with those costs. Or there will be sort of collaborations among organizations that don't necessarily include adult education. For some reason, we aren't always at the table. But then beginning to explore those collaborations that are really looking at intentionally building pathways and opening up opportunities and creating talent pipelines, that they can also be really excellent partners because they have more funding that doesn't have as many constraints as you were talking about.

So Nancy, as you said, yes, I think that there are always these constraints around funding. Although I'd check in on your Title II, your AFLA funds, because sometimes, those can be expended in different ways separately from CAEP. But that would also be something that you all might want to have a conversation with your leadership, Mayra, to sort of put you forward. Also, CDE has Carol and Zachary. They also have a different look at how CAEP funds should be expended. So maybe also talking with your leadership and explaining how these things impact your enrollment in the success of learners.

Alexandria Wright: Thank you, Blaire. And that's such a great conversation to have because what is that reflective of? Step 5 of Pathway Planning. This is exactly the conversation about identifying tangible pathway system changes to address equity gaps. So Blaire mentioned a couple there. Another one could be in partnership with your workforce development board and AGCC.

But another one for those schools, again-- and I know San Diego is full of them-- a lot of them, actually, throughout the state of California-- for those adult education programs that are located within your community college that are being hosted by a community college, a systems change to address equity would be to have that adult ed program be able to leverage any dollars and revenue coming out of contract education, right?

Because, again, economic and workforce development encompass contract ed, non-credit, and adult education. That's really, technically, what's housed in economic and workforce development. That is a substantial system change to address an equity gap, to provide that kind of funding. So it's a perfect example of that. OK, great. I'm going to move on then here. All right.

So let's look at construction, manufacturing, and engineering pathways. I know this is three big sectors, and people might be going, what do you mean you're going to look at all three of these? But again, in the modern era, we have to look at skills and intersectoral skills in order to build value in the student and the labor market.

So versus what we did in health care, I'm going to do something slightly different here. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at my Opportunity Map. So for those of you-- whatever schools you're in, you have that little link to your Opportunity Maps. We pulled up-- I pulled up here-- again, we're looking at San Diego Imperial area. I looked at engineering, construction, transportation, and manufacturing. The reason why they're, again, cobbled together is because they're very, very similar foundational skill set.

It takes a while to get hyper specialized. So we see our common skills here-- communications. You're always going to see communications, and you're always going to see Microsoft Excel. I've been doing this research across the country. Microsoft Office Specialist exams, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel-- these are cross-sectoral in demand. You may not think about it, but the reality is manufacturing plants are using Excel for inventory-- their ERP and MRP systems, the resource management systems. They're always using something that's kind of Excel based. So making sure that students have that digital literacy and that they can articulate that is helping to fill that equity gap.

So we have our certificates here. We have our middle skills jobs in the areas that match up those certificate skills with the approximate median wage. We did look at-- I take that back. Median wages for the associate degree jobs and the bachelor degree-- jobs we did look at the bottom, I believe, quintile of wages. So it's kind of a starting salary, if that makes sense. Instead of looking at the median or the average, we looked at what that bottom quintile is going to be paying. And that's probably a good approximation for that entry-level starting salary.

So we can see here we have a lot of different stuff-- avionics tech, industrial engineering tech, civil engineering tech, electrical engineering tech, architectural drafters-- all that good stuff for associate-degree jobs. And look at here-- CNC machine-- CNC programmer, right? And this also-- I know because I've been working in this field for so many darn years and doing industry credentials for so many years that it's not just the CNC programmer.

It's the CNC operator that also pays livable wages that you can get straight out of adult school. I've seen adult schools offer solid works, actually, as an IET or career education program as well, which gets you right into some of these really good, good-paying middle-skills jobs.

So I'm going to go through this stuff again, and then we're going to go through the dashboard. Step number one-- query by sector then region. So we're going to for our sector, and then we're going to look for our region. Step number two-- we're going to look for our entry-level education. So we already looked at our Opportunity Map, so we're familiar with the occupations that we're going to see. We're going to query our two entry-level education categories and then maybe toggle to best understand what's going to go on after they complete these.

Then we're going to look at our adults ed regional program offerings, make sure that we're filling a gap-- we're not duplicating anything-- and make sure that we're leveraging something. And then step four-- oh, sorry, here. That should be a four. We're going to query by closest college and award type. Again, you can choose your college, or you can just choose the award type. And that, again, we'll help us understand how to build those stackables. We're going to look at the community college programs by occupational cluster, right?